While We Live We Learn
by Moiraina
Summary: To miss Your Special Someone by a thousand years, by a thousand kilometers or by a couple of months and pitiful forty five steps…Or just by two floors? Twenty three stairs…and by a few black-white tiles of St.Mungo's corridor floor?


**_Life goes, passes us by, makes scars, crushes days and months and years and people. They're not twenty-year-old boys anymore and Sirius has had a hard time dealing with that. Somewhere along the way he has lost Remus…what makes him find his Home again?_**

_Oh Merlin! Holy fucking Merlin!_

_Why did you make me so stupid?! Maybe old McGonagall was right…No wonder I never got an 'O'!_

Sirius inhales deeply, and exhales, leaning against the door, holding desperately to the wooden frame as if someone could snatch it away from him? The same way Remus leaned against one old oak last year, after a trip to the sea side on Sirius' motorbike. Back then Sirius hadn't even considered that it might not have been entirely because of the serpentine roads and three thousand Celsius degrees in the air…

"You're not well, Moony? Why?" he asked then.

Remus looked at him strangely, amber eyes nothing more than two blinking riddles which Sirius, then, didn't know how to solve. Oh, not even later…Remus was sending his coded little messages, pointing to the Small Changes that were announcing the arrival of The Big Change but those messages in glass bottles, unfortunately, got lost somewhere in the Restless Sea on which Sirius was sailing like a cursed, ghost ship.

His thoughts were completely muffled by a persistent ringing coming from the bells of The Cathedral Of Time, which towers Sirius saw clearly somewhere on the horizon…Too lost in that noise he stopped listening to shaky, desperate little whispers that were telling him what he needed, searched, desired, longed to hear all along…and of course, Remus gave up. Who wouldn't?!

Those amber eyes think that Sirius doesn't love them anymore.

And so it goes.

Sirius has left him alone, for far too long in that Dangerous Stillness, in those Silences where he is his only companion and in which nothing good about Sirius is being said…  
And now they are where they are.

Everyone knows that tale about two stubborn goats, one white as snow, one black as night, but both rather stubborn as goats can be. When they meet each other on a narrow plank that spans a deep stream and neither one wants to move to let the other pass? Yes? Well, there is also a version where the two stubborn goats just stare at each other for a long time, and then they just turn around, go back from where they came and they just leave…just go their separate ways.

Oh, bugger everything!

Life doesn't come with instructions and step-by-step guides (although Remus might not agree with that because, PLEASE, it's all in the books really), and not even his Márquez or Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Mann or Kafka or Orwell or Hesse or Hemingway could put that in words, on paper, black on white. The fact is, people live how they can, how they know, some choose to remain silent when others would yell, laugh when others would cry, insult when others would support, stay when others would leave…

Get on a wrong train, get off at a station earlier…or later…

Change their mind, just throw away the paddle and let the river take them further down, somewhere unknown…

Yes, Sirius has spent a lot of time thinking about life, about aging, about being old, about Time - Our Executioner, but he hasn't been thinking about Time that plants us and sows us and seeds us in Its fields, disperses us carelessly like a wind disperses clover seeds from a tired villager's old bag with holes.

They could have been born in Tórshavn, in 5th century b.c? On Hawaii last Monday? In the shadows of Cordilleras sometime next spring? Or in this same, rainy muggle London but three thousand Octobers ago?

On this goddamned Earth, The Lost Ones are wandering, desperately seeking people that they can love and hold close and dear…And, in the name of Merlin, Sirius doesn't know what's worse anymore?! To miss Your Special Someone by a thousand years, by a thousand kilometers or by a couple of months and pitiful forty five steps…Or just by two floors? Twenty three stairs…and by a few black-white tiles of 's corridor floor?

"I'll stay until he wakes up."

The sound of those words make the Healer open his mouth, determined to say something but the look in Sirius' eyes isn't in the mood for negotiation. Because, there on a hospital bed, only a breath away, unconscious and pale lies the only love he has ever had.

"Mr. Black?" the Healer is persistent. "You know it was only appendicitis right? He can go home tomorrow. No need to -" But Sirius doesn't hear the rest and he takes a hand painted with silver scars in his own and holds it tight. Interlocking his fingers with Remus' Sirius writes a thesis, an essay, an epistle - Home. Yes. Here. Sorry. Never again. Make it up to you. Now. Love. Live. Breathe You. Nothing else. Only You. Just You. For you. Forever. Always. Only.

And then, a weak, soft squeeze in response. And a smile, a smile at the corner of those lips that breathe life into Sirius and are the reason that days turn to gold, misery turns to happiness, sour turns to sweet, cosmos of greyness bursts into colors and Sirius Black's knees turn to putty (and will continue to do so even when he is a senile 112-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis and a plastic hip.)


End file.
